“... from images of the War in its first years: black-out blinds, allotments, digging for victory,‘George Formby’s uke’, those wrought iron railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems ...”

“... as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the ...”

“... music-hall turn way past his best’), Woodrow Wyatt (‘always a bounder and a cad’) and George Brown (‘an alcoholic for whom the twin obsessions of drink and politics were two attempts to escape from some inner grief’). The aim of biography, he writes, is to understand an individual life by describing all the forces that shape it. Since the ...”

“... The young Hector was brought up in Devonshire by two supposedly harsh, repressive aunts. Like George Orwell, he served briefly in the Burma police. Invalided out, he was next seen as a near-dandy and struggling writer in London, somewhat given to practical joking. He was also given to what his sister Ethel, who burned his letters after he died, called ...”

“... fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains while wearing a gorilla mask. In 1950 he went on a Fulbright to Aix-en-Provence. Not only did he immerse himself in modern French ...”

“... and which, as the latest general editors point out, would make little sense if the poet was George Herbert. Long reprinted, Bateson’s preface has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For ...”

“... The list of Leonardo da Vinci’s accomplishments is long and famously various – painter, inventor, anatomist, mathematician, musician and so on – but it seldom includes the word ‘writer’. This is curious considering his enormously prolific output. His extant manuscripts and notebooks run to something like seven thousand pages (though some of them are very small) and this is only a part, perhaps about two thirds, of the total ...”

“... Lucan would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his wife, Kaitlin, much was made in 1974 of his ancestry, in particular the life and character of his great-great-grandfather, the third earl. In addition to treating his Irish tenants at the time of ...”

“... social ruthlessness, breathing, eating, sleeping, dreaming obsessiveness of a great painter or musician. In war, the spiritual anarchy of the great general confronts the physical anarchy of its facts and masters them. Montgomery had that anarchic power. And his company commander, together with a thousand other dutiful servants of the ...”

“... for greatness; Yeats was virtually an autodidact. His father, a wit, a good writer and a gifted painter who rarely finished a picture, was perpetually broke and shamelessly improvident. He wanted his son to be a poet, but seemed not to care much about the boy’s schooling; and however grim the financial prospect, he disliked the notion that his son, being ...”

“... of it, rather than writings about the world!’ One of his most striking artist-heroes, the painter Fra Lippo Lippi, serves as his best spokesman among several in this. The poem begins with Lippo, who has been leaning out of the window for fresh air, deciding to jump for it: in this case the window is in the Medici palace, where he has been locked up ...”

“... locksmith, coppersmith, mechanic, workman, labourer, wharf porter, servant, sandwich man, sign painter, house decorator, journalist, photographer’, as Romain Rolland described him, Istrati was a critic of Soviet society who was denounced by the Comintern denigration and, like Victor Serge, abused as an ‘anti-Moscow anarchist’. Visitors to the Soviet ...”

“... was even a sign of distinction and ‘sensibility’ that in no way compromised their virility. (George Cheyne, writing in 1773 in The English Malady, went so far as to connect ‘nervous diseases’ to the progress of civilisation.) This plainly contradicts Micale’s main argument. ‘In Great Britain for a full century following the 1688 revolution, the ...”

“... down his neck insisting on economy. It was probably only the support of the director, the painter Francis Newbery (an Englishman), that made it possible. Worse, the architectural climate in Glasgow was changing. Since 1904 the head of the School of Architecture had been a Beaux-Arts trained Frenchman, Eugène Bourdon, who was strongly opposed to the ...”

“... Eardley’s paintings of the Samson children, they seem to have some common knowledge only the painter can access. They are fidgety children who become fixed with candour; they are tenement apparitions, scratched into the urban record, surrounded by a randomness of graffiti and change.Eardley’s short career is one of the most fascinating of her ...”